A Sharp Solitude_A Novel of Suspense Read online

  Now we rarely speak other than to discuss Emily or her schedule or when I see him to either drop her off or pick her up from his place. It’s possible to get over your attraction to someone; it just takes time and the ability to move the feelings to the corner of your mind, where they pop up only occasionally, similar to old acquaintances at the grocery store, sometimes welcome, sometimes not. It’s not ideal—coparenting never is—but Emily, who is five now, loves to spend time with her daddy and his dog, McKay.

  So when I get the call from Reeve on a chilly early November day, I assume it has something to do with Emily, that he needs to reschedule his weekend with her for a work excursion, which irritates me because I know if he misses the little time he has with Emily, she’ll be sad. But the second I hear his voice, I sense something is up, because he sounds a little breathless and worried.

  “What’s up?” I ask, sitting at my desk in my office in Kalispell. The day is cloudy and dim, so I have my desk lamp on and it’s exposing every bit of dust on the black chrome-framed furniture even though I dust the damn thing all the time.

  “Ali,” he says after clearing his throat, “I need your help.”

  Help? Reeve Landon doesn’t ask for help any more than I do, so I pause before saying more.

  “Ali,” he says again, his voice slightly rising, a trace of worry in the pitch of it, which is also unusual. “You still there?”

  “I’m here. What kind of help?”

  “I need you to go to my place. I need you to get McKay and take care of him for a few hours. Just until I can sort out a few things. I’d ask Wallace, but he’s just left for the winter.”

  Now I know it’s serious. Reeve rarely parts with his dog. He’s worked with McKay for at least five years as part of a detection-canine program that performs conservation and biological research. Apparently there is a lot you can learn from the poop animals leave behind. It didn’t take me long to understand—a few months after we began seeing each other—that the program and the dog are lifelines for Reeve. I get that. I’ve got a few of those myself, mainly Emily and my job.

  The training is an ongoing process, Reeve has said more times than I can count, especially when he’s making excuses for why he can’t be there for Emily. According to Reeve, he’s the only one who understands how to keep the dog on a schedule. He’s taught Emily a little, but she’s too young to understand much.

  “Watch McKay? Why? Where are you?”

  Reeve doesn’t answer at first, and silence hangs between us on the line.

  “Reeve,” I press. “Where are you? Whose line are you using?”

  “I’m at the county building, at the sheriff’s office. I’m using one of their landlines. I don’t know how long I’ll be here.”

  “How long you’ll be there? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. I think they think I’ve done something. . . . I’ve already been here for four hours. They’ve been questioning me—making me go over the same information over and over, but mostly I’ve been doing a lot of sitting and waiting. They’re inspecting my phone, so I had to use theirs to call to you, but look, I have to go. The officer wants me to hang up now.”

  “Wait,” I say. “They’re looking at your phone?”

  “They asked to see it.”

  “What are they saying you’ve done?”

  “I’m not sure,” he says. “But whatever they think, it’s not true.”

  “What’s not true?”

  “I don’t know. That I’ve got something to do with whatever is up with that journalist.”

  “What journalist?”

  He pauses, then sighs. “I’m not positive, but I think something happened to her, and whatever it is, they think I’m involved.”

  The sense of something icy, like a cold hand, presses against my neck and moves down my spine.

  “Listen, Ali, the spare key to my cabin is under the tin can in the back.” And just like that, he’s gone, the line blank.

  Reeve

  * * *

  Wednesday—The Day Before

  THE HYPNOSIS CREATED by the vastness of the Montana sky and the mountains loosens its grip on me today because I am not working alone for the first time in a very long while. A reporter named Anne Marie Johnson, who’s doing a story for Sierra magazine, is hiking with me up a dried-out creek drainage about ten miles outside Glacier National Park.

  McKay, my dog, is weaving through the underbrush about twenty yards ahead of us, poking his nose into shrubbery and leaping over fallen logs. Like a metronome, his tail whips back and forth, which tells me there’s scat close by, but I won’t be sure which kind until we reach it. Mainly we’re looking for grizzly droppings, but McKay is also trained in a dozen other species, from bats to wolverines. He can search for just about any scat made by a carnivore: black bear, grizzly bear, lynx, wolf, bobcat, coyote, and mountain lion. I’ll send any sample he sniffs out to the university, where scientists will extract hormones and DNA to gather clues on the size of their population in the area, their distribution over the landscape, the areas they share, their levels of stress, indications that they’re being poisoned, their mating habits and pregnancies, their lineage, their use of the resources, and many more factors.

  “So you think there’s some scat nearby?” Anne Marie asks me.

  Anne Marie is writing a feature story on the University of Montana’s detection-canine research program and has asked to tag along. I met her at the Polebridge Mercantile, a bakery/store combo that serves as a link to civilization in a township with a population of about 150. I was ready to sit over coffee and answer her questions because my boss, Jeffrey O’Brien, had said, Give her what she needs to write her story. It’s good press for the program. I figured I’d do just that, then set out on my own without her.

  I don’t like reporters, but she insisted on coming along so she could get a few photos and really understand how the whole process works. She promised she could handle the rugged terrain, and when I met her outside the Merc, she was wearing camouflage combat pants and a tan fleece and said she’d brought bear spray, a potent form of pepper that works on bears and other predators; a lunch; and a raincoat, in case the weather turned. She wore a Grand Canyon ball cap the color of orange clay and, most importantly, she had on real hiking boots. At least she came prepared, I thought, noticing her smile—one of those unabashed, infectious ones.

  “Yeah,” I say. “He’s onto something. Could be black bear scat. We’ll see.” McKay continues to quarter back and forth through the brush, always within earshot, until he abruptly stops, his entire body stiffening except his tail, which spins rapidly in circles. “Whaddya got?” I ask him.

  We walk closer, and I see he’s frozen with his nose pointing at a pile that looks like dried-out batter for some bran muffins. I kneel on one knee and hold up my palm for him to wait, to settle down. He’s anticipating the one thing he cares about more than anything in the world besides my daughter, Emily—a red rubber ball the size of a tennis ball, his reward for doing his job correctly. McKay licks his lips, stands erect, and quivers with excitement as I pull it from my pack and toss it for him to fetch. He leaps to go find it. It lands in a thick copse of alders with bright yellow leaves. I pull out my smartphone and begin to enter data about the sample.

  “What are you recording?” Anne Marie moves closer to peer over my shoulder, and I can smell a lovely citrus scent, maybe a body wash or perfume mixed with sweat from all the climbing we’ve done.

  “The type of animal that left the pile and how long it’s been here,” I answer. “In this case, a grizzly. Been here about a day. I’m also taking a GPS reading and a picture,” I say, holding up my phone to snap the photo. McKay is back with his ball and shoves it at my thigh. Anne Marie backs slightly away from us. I grab the ball and throw it even farther for him, and it lands in some brush a long way out.

  “He’s fast,” she says, laughing.

  I put my phone away.

  “How do you know it’s a gr
izzly and not a black bear’s scat?”

  “Size, mainly. Depends on the season. In the summer, lots of berries in it. Around this time, more roots and tubers. Only a griz goes this big—scat wider than two inches in diameter—and only a griz has claws long enough to dig for roots. But it’s not a perfect science,” I say. “They’ll know more in the lab.”

  She gives me that big smile again, and I can’t help but notice how her eyes crinkle with mischief and a brazen joy long gone in myself. “But how does your dog find one random pile out here? In all this wilderness?” She motions to our surroundings—a drainage filled with jutting large boulders and steep hillsides choked with alder shrubs and thimbleberry and huckleberry bushes. Autumn has been rainy and gloomy so far, and this is the first sunny day in weeks. Bushes and deciduous trees have dropped gold and yellow leaves that the previous rain has papier-mâchéd to the game trails traversing the drainage.

  “His sense of smell is quite good,” I say—an understatement. A dog’s nose is one of the most sensitive among the animal kingdom, capable of identifying cancer cells and finding illegal drugs hidden inside strong-smelling containers like gas tanks. “Most scent dogs are being trained to find evidence, drugs, bombs, or dead bodies.”

  When she looks down at her notepad, a piece of her dark hair falls out of one thick braid and settles in a broad-sweeping curl across her cheek. I notice a smattering of freckles across her sharp cheekbones. “Our dogs are simply trained to find the poop of certain species.”

  She nods, her eyes still dancing, like the information delights her. A wave of pride for McKay sweeps over me, and a joy that feels foreign spreads inside my chest. I had already explained to her that the idea came to a biologist in the late nineties after he had studied baboons and elephants in Africa and learned to extract DNA and hormones from their scat. It dawned on him that if dogs could smell ten thousand times better than humans, they could locate the samples over vast landscapes. No other wildlife sampling method can acquire so much data in such a short time without disturbing the environment.

  I continue to toss the ball for McKay. I’m used to his intensity, but Anne Marie watches him closely and inches slightly away when he gets close to her legs, as if she’s a little unnerved by his laser focus and his excited panting.

  “Yeah,” I offer, as if I’m answering a question she hasn’t even posed, “he’s crazed, all right. One of the more manic dogs in the program. That’s what lands them in the program in the first place.”

  I explain to her what happened with McKay. How he’s six now, but still indefatigable. As a puppy, he was given to the Humane Society because the family couldn’t handle such an intense dog, one who wanted to play all the time. I picked him after the shelter called our program to alert us that he was unlikely to be adopted. He was four months old.

  “Their fanaticism drives the owners crazy,” I tell her. “But for us, we simply use their obsessions to our advantage. Train them to go for that goal, whatever it may be. For some, it’s food or a bone. For McKay”—I wing the ball into the woods again—“it’s obviously fetch. If he finds scat, he gets to play. It’s that simple. A misfit in the world of pets, but perfect for science.” It’s not in my nature to smile, mainly because I’m alone in the woods so much, but her cheerfulness brings it out in me, and as we chat, I’m actually aware of my cheeks lifting and bulging against my will.

  “Won’t he slow down as he gets older?”

  “Hasn’t so far. But he’s in great shape still.”

  “And you’re telling me he doesn’t drive you crazy?”

  “No, because I wear him out on these long treks. I deplete his energy every day, unless I’m sick or injured and can’t take him out. Then, yeah, it’s a nightmare. Fortunately I don’t get sick or injured very often.”

  Anne Marie studies me, only a hint of her smile still playing at the corners of her mouth. The brim of her cap shields her eyes, but I can tell she’s trying to understand what kind of a person can walk the rugged Montana woods for miles almost every day of his life, poking at animal scat, with only the company of a crazy chocolate Lab.

  “Sometimes,” I say, “he gets so exhausted that he needs a day of rest himself.” I don’t tell her about the days that I try extra hard to drain his energy by taking longer, vigorous hikes right before Emily comes to visit me so that McKay will be tamer than usual around her. Nor do I tell her that being a handler is more of a lifestyle choice than a job.

  I take a ziplock bag out of my pocket and put the sample in it. “Attaboy,” I say to McKay. “That’s it, buddy.” I grab the ball and put it away, pour him some water in a foldable nylon bowl, and at first he refuses to drink in case I might still pull the ball out and throw it for him. “Drink up, buddy,” I say. “Playtime’s over.”

  He stares at me intently for a moment, then gives in and laps at the water.

  I peer out at the distant slopes. The tamarack trees blaze with yellow needles, making the hillsides look from afar as if they’re covered in a knitted blanket of burnt yellow and dark green. “Ready to search more?” I ask once McKay is finished drinking.

  “Sure,” she says, but I wonder if she’s getting tired. We’ve already hiked about eight miles.

  “You sure?” I ask.

  “Positive.” She sighs. “It’s gorgeous out here.”

  I don’t press her anymore because I want more samples, and she did say she could handle long-distance treks. Up ahead, there’s a rocky slope at about 6,500 feet. I want to reach the summit, then circle back down. Two days ago, snow doused its top, but now the sun beats on it and its rocky serrations are bare. You never know what kind of weather you’re going to get in the fall in Northwest Montana. In fact, it’s impossible to live along the Continental Divide without constantly monitoring its ever-changing weather. An afternoon can easily drop from seventy degrees to forty-five with an accumulation of a few nasty clouds over the mountains.

  But today there are no clouds building over the peaks. The sky and the afternoon seem to unfurl and invite us to go farther. It’s delightful to see the sun, the rays strong enough at high noon to make me take off my jacket. Contentment falls upon me like an old blanket, and I feel connected to everything surrounding me. The only other time I ever feel like this is when Emily is falling asleep on my shoulder or I’m watching her descend into a giggle fit.

  Anne Marie tosses her braid over her shoulder and begins to follow McKay as he leaps off into the woods again, but right as she takes her second step, she stumbles. I reach out to steady her. She flails and, just before she falls, grabs my arm at the same time I find hers, her fingernails gouging my forearm.

  I manage to grab her before she goes down. “Are you all right?” I ask as she steadies herself.

  “I’m fine.” She looks down and inspects her legs as if she’s expecting a noticeable injury, like a sprained ankle.

  “Everything okay?” I double-check.

  “Yeah.” She looks back up at me, holding a hand up. “Just a broken nail.”

  I look down at my arm. One short and two longer scratches that begin to fill with blood traverse my forearm. “I can see why.”

  “Oh,” she says when she sees the scratches and brings a hand to her mouth. “I didn’t realize. . . . I’m so sorry. Here I am going on about a nail. Those scratches look like they could get infected.”

  “It’s no big deal,” I tell her. “I have ointment in my kit.” I take my pack off again, pull out a rolled-up nylon pouch, and remove the tube of Neosporin. I wipe the blood with a cotton swab, apply the ointment on the scratch marks, and stick the kit back in my pack. “There,” I say. “All good. You sure you’re good to go on?”

  “Positive,” she says as I slide my pack back over my shoulders.

  Ali

  * * *

  Present—Thursday

  I STARE AT MY cell phone for a moment after Reeve hangs up. I want to call him back and tell him a few basics—mainly that unless he’s under arrest, they can
’t hold him, and they should have informed him of that. I’m guessing they did, but most people who are questioned by cops, even if it’s voluntary, feel like they can’t leave until they’re dismissed. Reeve can walk out at any time to go take care of McKay. But then again, I’m certain he knows this. This isn’t his first rodeo. Studies show that most victims of untreated childhood trauma are practically guaranteed stints in juvie or at least some form of rehab, and Reeve followed that trajectory to a tee. Smaller events—like failing a class or getting dumped by a girlfriend or boyfriend—have sent kids spiraling out of control. Thankfully, Reeve managed to turn that all around before he ended up incarcerated as an adult.

  The situation sounds serious, though. I look over at Herman, my only coworker in the Kalispell regional agency, who’s sitting at his desk. A streak of light from the overheads slashes across his bald head. I call him Hollywood because he dresses to the nines, at least by Montana standards—meaning he doesn’t get his suits off the rack at the local department stores like JCPenney or Herberger’s—and always wears designer glasses. I get his attention and tell him that I have errands to run and might not be back in until the morning.

  Herman and I have known each other for two years. He transferred to the area from the Salt Lake City field office after I had already transferred from Newark. In this business, in order to advance, you have to move around—acquire a varied mix of expertise. In the smaller resident agencies, you get to work all sorts of cases: fraud, corruption, cyber scams, child pornography, interstate drug networks, terrorism, criminal networks. You get to become a jack-of-all-trades, capable of working any case, anytime, unlike the agents in the field offices, who usually specialize in only one or two areas.

  Once you become multifaceted in your qualifications—a generalist—you can theoretically move anywhere in the United States. That’s what Herman is shooting for. That’s what I too had in mind in the beginning, but since Emily came along, I’ve reconsidered for her sake. Many agents used to think being sent to Montana was like being stationed in Siberia—a purgatory of sorts for difficult or embarrassing agents. But once those that liked to fish, hunt, hike, camp, and ski learned that Northwest Montana was idyllic and that, because of the Internet, there was plenty of crime to be solved no matter where you were, it became a sought-after place. Why not live where the traffic doesn’t raise your blood pressure? I ask myself when I long for the city. Plus, I happen to like the area, not because I fish or hunt or romanticize the Wild West, but because I think it’s a good place to raise Emily.